Edward Morley Hoagland (December 21, 1932 – February 17, 2026) was an American author best known for his nature and travel writing.

Life and career Edward Morley Hoagland was born in New York City on December 21, 1932. He attended Deerfield Academy and matriculated at Harvard University. He joined the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in the summers of 1951 and 1952. He helped tend the big cats and sold a novel about the experience, Cat Man (1955), before graduating from Harvard in 1954. After serving two years in the Army, he published The Circle Home (1960), a novel about boxing, before going on the first of nine trips to Alaska and British Columbia.

During the 1970s, he made the first two of his five trips to Africa. After receiving two Guggenheim Fellowships, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982. He taught at The New School, Rutgers, Sarah Lawrence, CUNY, the University of Iowa, U.C. Davis, Columbia University, Beloit College, and Brown University. In 2005, Hoagland retired from a teaching position at Bennington College. Starting in 1968, he focused mostly on Montaigne-type essays.

According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography,

After retiring, Hoagland spent summers in Barton, Vermont, at a place he had owned since 1969, and winters in Martha's Vineyard. He died in Manhattan on February 17, 2026, aged 93.

Critique Hoagland's nonfiction was praised by writers and critics such as John Updike, who called him "the best essayist of my generation"; Duffy, John J & Hand, B Samuel . The Vermont Encyclopedia. UPNE, 2003 Philip Roth, who called him "America’s most intelligent and wide-ranging essayist-naturalist"; and Alfred Kazin, who said he "writes for magazines on all manner of topics with regular, predictable brilliance".

Bibliography Books Cat Man, Houghton Mifflin, 1956; NAL, 1958; Ballantine, 1973; Arbor House, 1984; Lyons Press, 2003 The Circle Home, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1960; Avon, 1977; Lyons Press, 2003 The Peacock's Tail, McGraw-Hill, 1965 Notes from the Century Before: A Journal from British Columbia, Random House, 1969; Ballantine, 1972; North Point Press, 1982; Sierra Club Books, 1995; Modern Library, 2002 The Courage of Turtles, Random House, 1971; Warner, 1974; North Point Press, 1985; Lyons & Burford, 1993 Walking the Dead Diamond River, Random House, 1973; Warner, 1974; North Point Press, 1985; Lyons & Burford, 1993 The Moose on the Wall, Barrie & Jenkins, 1974 Red Wolves and Black Bears, Random House, 1976; Penguin, 1983; Lyons & Burford, 1995 African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan, Random House, 1979; Penguin, 1981; Lyons & Burford, 1995 The Edward Hoagland Reader, Random House, 1979; Vintage, 1981 The Tugman's Passage, Random House, 1982; Penguin, 1983; Lyons & Burford, 1995 City Tales, Capra Press, 1986 Seven Rivers West, Simon & Schuster, 1986; Penguin, 1987; Lyons Press, 2003 Heart's Desire, Simon & Schuster, 1988; Collins Harville, 1990; Touchstone, 1991 The Final Fate of the Alligators, Capra Press, 1992 Balancing Acts, Simon & Schuster, 1992, Touchstone, 1993; Lyons Press, 1999 Tigers & Ice, Lyons Press, 1999 Compass Points, Pantheon, 2001; Vintage, 2002 Hoagland on Nature, Lyons Press, 2003 Early in the Season, Douglas & McIntyre, 2008 Sex and the River Styx, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011 Alaskan Travels, Arcade Publishing, 2012 Children Are Diamonds, Arcade Publishing, 2013

Short stories

"Cowboys," The Noble Savage, No. 1, February 1960 "The Last Irish Fighter," Esquire, August 1960 "The Witness," The Paris Review, Summer-Fall 1967 "The Colonel's Power," New American Review, No. 2, January 1968 "Kwan's Coney Island," New American Review, No. 5, January 1969 "A Fable of Mammas," Transatlantic Review, No. 32, Summer 1969 "The Final Fate of the Alligators," The New Yorker, October 18, 1969 "Seven Rivers West," Esquire, July 1986 "The Mind's Eye," The Nature of Nature, (ed. Wm. Shore), Harcourt, 1994 "The Devil's Tub," Yale Review, Autumn, 2005 "Triage Along the Nile," Conjunctions, Fall 2008 "In Africa," New Letters, vol. 74, Fall 2008

Essays

"The Big Cats," Esquire, April 1961 "The Draft Card Gesture," Commentary, February 1968 "Notes from the Century Before," The Paris Review, Winter 1968 "On Not Being a Jew," Commentary, April 1968 "The Threshold and the Jolt of Pain," The Village Voice, October 17, 1968 "The Courage of Turtles," The Village Voice, December 12, 1968 "The Elephant Trainer and the Man on Stilts," The Village Voice, April 17, 1969 "Why this Extra Violence," The Village Voice, May 8, 1969 "Knights and Squires: For Love of the Tugs," The Village Voice, May 29, 1969 "The Problem of the Golden Rule," Commentary, August 1969 "Blitzes and Holding Actions," The Village Voice, October 16, 1969 "Books, Movies, the News," Book World, November 9, 1969 "Home is Two Places," Commentary, February 1970 "The Circus in 1970," The Village Voice, April 9, 1970 "The Moose on the Wall," New American Review, No. 9, April 1970 "Americana by the Acre," Harper's, October 1970 "Meatcutters Are a Funny Bunch," The Village Voice, December 17, 1970 "The Portland Freight Run," The Atlantic, February 1971 "The War in the Woods," Harper's, February 1971 "Splendid, with Trumpets," The Village Voice, April 8, 1971 "Two Clowns," Life, April 25, 1971 "The Assassination Impulse," The Village Voice, May 27, 1971 "Of Cows and Cambodia," The Atlantic, July 1971 "The Soul of the Tiger," Esquire, July 1971 "Hailing the Elusory Mountain Lion," The New Yorker, August 7, 1971 "Jane Street's Samurai," The Village Voice, November 25, 1971 "Nobody Writes Stories about Unicorns," The Village Voice, December 16, 1971 "Passions and Tensions," The Village Voice, February 2, 1972 "On the Question of Dogs," The Village Voice, March 30, 1972 "City Rat," Audience, March–April 1972 "Women Aflame," The Village Voice, April 27, 1972 "Marriage, Fame, Power, Success," The Village Voice, May 18, 1972 "In the Toils of the Law," The Atlantic, June 1972 "Looking for Wilderness," The Atlantic, August 1972 "Thoughts on Returning to the Mountain..." The Village Voice, November, 1972 "Heart's Desire," Audience, November–December 1972 "Howling Back at the Wolves," Saturday Review, December 1972 "Wall Maps and Woodpeckers," The Village Voice, January 25, 1973 "Fred King on the Allagash," Audience, January–February 1973 "Mountain Towers," The Village Voice, February 15, 1973 "At Pinkham Notch," The Village Voice, March 15, 1973 "Wildlands in Vermont," The Village Voice, March 22, 1973 "In a Lair with a Bear," Sports Illustrated, March 26, 1973 "Tricks, Innocence, Pathos, Perfection," The Village Voice, May 10, 1973 "The Young Must Do the Healing," New York Times Magazine, June 10, 1973 "Other Lives," Harper's, July 1973 "A Run of Bad Luck," Newsweek, July 30, 1973 "Writing Wild," New York Times Book Review, September 23, 1973 "That Gorgeous Great Novelist," The Village Voice, November 15, 1973 "But Where Is Home," New York Times Book Review, December 23, 1973 "A Mountain with a Wolf on It," Sports Illustrated, January 14, 1974 "Where Have All the Heroes Gone," New York Times Magazine, March 10, 1974 "Where the Action Is," New York Times Book Review, October 13, 1974 "Nine Home Truths about Writing," The Village Voice, January 20, 1975 "The Tug of Life at the End of the Leash," Harper's, February 1975 "Big Frog, Very Small Pond," Sports Illustrated, March 3, 1975 "The Survival of the Newt," New York Times Magazine, July 27, 1975 "Apocalypse Enough," Not Man Apart, July 1975 "A Paradox among Us," Harper's, January 1976 "Southern Mansions," Travel & Leisure, February 1976 "What I Think, What I Am," New York Times Book Review, June 27, 1976 "Cairo Observed," Harper's, June 1976 "At Large in East Africa," Harper's, August 1976 "The Fragile Writer," New York Times Book Review, December 12, 1976 "The Ridge-Slope Fox and the Knife-Thrower," Harper's, January 1977 "Do Writers Stay Home," New York Times Book Review, May 22, 1977 "Without American Express," New York Times Book Review, June 4, 1978 "Into Eritrea: Africa's Red Sea War," Harper's, July 1978 "Unsilent Spring," The Nation, May 26, 1979 "Gabriel, Who Wanted to Know," The New England Review, Summer 1979 "Tugs," Harper's, December 1979 "Johnny Appleseed," American Heritage, December–January 1979 "Being Between Books," New York Times Book Review, October 28, 1979 "December Song," The Nation, December 6, 1980 "America Was Promises (Still)," The Nation, February 21, 1981 "Making of a Writer," New York Times Book Review, October 4, 1981 "Gods, Masks, and Horses," Vanity Fair, July 1983 "Anchorage," Vanity Fair, October 1983 "Up the Black to Chalkyitsik," House and Garden, June 1984 "Hail the Anhinga," The Nation, June 9, 1984 "Memories of Circuses Past," The Nation, March 9, 1985 "In Okefenokee," National Geographic Traveler, Spring 1985 "Nectar Feeding," The Nation, July 20, 1985 "In Praise of John Muir," Antaeus, Autumn 1986 "Three Trains Across Canada," Travel & Leisure, March 1987 "Up with Spring," The Nation, June 6, 1987 "Treasured Places," Life, July 1987 "Summer Skunks," The Nation, August 29, 1987 "Christmases Past," The Nation, December 26, 1987 "Heaven and Nature," Harper's, March 1988 "Arabia Felix," Interview magazine, May 1988 "The Indispensable Thoreau," American Heritage, July 1988 "Learning to Eat Soup," Antaeus, Autumn 1988 "The Hunger in Manhattan Life," Harper's, June 1989 "Jubilant Spring," The Nation, June 19, 1989 "A World Worth Saving," Life, October 1989 "O Wyoming," Outside, October 1989 "Tolstoyan Tide," The Nation, May 14, 1990 "Shh, Our Writers Are Sleeping," Esquire, July 1990 "On Getting One's Footing" (reprinted from "Anxious Dreams", Manchester Guardian, January 20), Harper's, August 1990 "Roadless Regions," Literary Outtakes, September 1990 "Passing Views," Harper's, January 1991 "Good Trips, Bad Trips," Outside, April 1991 "The Best Idea," Life, May 1991 "Spring Medley," The Nation, June 10, 1991 "Holy Fools," The Nation, September 16, 1991 "Everybody Comes to Belize," Outside, February 1992 "Meat for the Old Man," Outside, May 1992 "Christmas Observed," New York Times Magazine, December 20, 1992 "To the Point," Harper's, March 1993 "Skin and Bones," The Nation, May 3, 1993 "The Unknown Thoreau," The Nation, June 7, 1993 "Nature's Seesaw," Vermont, May 1994 (also in Land's End Catalogue, September 1993) "All This Good World," Manoa, June 1994 "Strange Perfume," Esquire, June 1994 "The View from 61," New York Times Magazine, November 27, 1994 "Brightness Visible," Harper's, January 1995 "Surge Time at the Bottom of the Earth," Outside, March 1995 "Scenes from a Forty-Year War," The Nation, April 10, 1995 "Like a Saul Bellow Character," Salmagundi, Spring 1995 "Stepping Back," New York Times Magazine, November 12, 1995 "Books that Need Authors," The Nation, November 13, 1995 "The Daring Art of Rockwell Kent," Civilization, January 1996 "Dying Argots," Harper's, January 1996 "Running Mates," Hungry Mind Review, November 1996 (also Spring 1999) "Generational Pioneer," New York Times Magazine, December 8, 1996 "A Last Look Around," Civilization, February 1997 "The Peaceable Kingdom," Preservation, March 1997 (also in Vermont, June 1999) "Wild Things," Granta, Spring 1997 "Samos, Reflections on Love, and Love Lost, On a Greek Island," Islands, June 1997 "Henry James and Porky Pig," The Nation, June 30, 1997 "The Sage of Selborne," The Yale Review, July 1997 "Spring Comes to the Kingdom," Vermont Woodlands, Spring 1998 "I Can See," Granta, Summer 1998 "India," River City, Summer 1998 "Vermont Journal," American Scholar, Summer 1998 "Vermont: Suite of Seasons," National Geographic, September 1998 "Lost Between Burma and Tibet," Outside, October 1998